The present application generally relates to maintaining infrastructure. More particularly, the present application relates to automatically establishing a maintenance plan of an infrastructure.
Drinking water in big cities (e.g., New York City, Chicago, etc.) is mostly transported through underground mains. A failure in such mains can cause not only substantial financial loss (e.g., spending more than $100,000 to repair, etc.) but also significant harm (e.g., contaminating drinking water, etc.) and social consequences (e.g., blocking traffic roads to repair the failed main(s)). There exist total 880,000 miles of water mains in United States. In average, 237,600 water main breaks occur per year. Those water main breaks causes $2.4 billion in loss annually.
Traditional concerns in an infrastructure network maintenance planning include, but not limited, the following issues:                a. There exists sparse historical data (e.g., prior maintenance record).        b. Repair condition of the infrastructure network may be harsh due to weather, time pressure, road traffic, and limited maintenance funding.        c. The traditional method predicts a future maintenance based on only a structure of the infrastructure network and expected life times of components in the infrastructure network.        d. Inspection cost of the infrastructure network is expensive (e.g., more than $10,000) because the network is usually buried in underground.        e. Notwithstanding the expensive cost, the traditional method involves periodic monitoring of the infrastructure network, e.g., by performing periodic inspection of the infrastructure network.        f. Traditional methods lack a cost-effective maintenance planning.        g. Traditional methods lack a criterion reflecting an effectiveness of a possible maintenance action.        h. Traditional methods do not jointly consider an availability of spare parts, an availability of resources (e.g. workforce, equipment), and job scheduling (e.g. determining an order or priority of maintenances).        